Breaking All the Rules

No sooner, it seems, does someone make a wine than someone else comes along to tell others how they should serve it. Which glass would be best. Decrees about proper temperature. And, not least, precisely which dishes go with which wines.

Waiters and sommeliers have become wine oracles and therapists dispensing affirmation (“Very good choice, madam”). Winemakers, for their part, have come to sound like television doctors, delivering impossibly precise prognoses (“This wine will be at its peak in two years”).

We wine writers are the worst. We’re in the advice-giving business, after all, so it’s a short, treacherous step from well-meant explanation to heady authoritarianism. Too much wine “advice” recalls the old German legalism, Was nicht er laubt ist verboten--what is not permitted is forbidden.

Wine pundits bristle with rules, admonitions and caveats. Winegrower August Sebastiani once said to me, “There oughta be a bag limit on wine writers.” I found it hard to argue.

The result of all these prescriptions is that wine drinkers mostly divide into two camps: the certain and the unsure. And there’s a good-size third group: those who are unsure but fake it. I always feel for them. Usually they’re men, occasionally women, who have been publicly called upon to choose the wine at a restaurant. Instead of forthrightly turning to the manager and saying, “Here’s what we’re eating. Serve us your best $25 bottle,” the hapless fellow feels compelled to pretend to a knowledge he doesn’t have.

Wine is supposed to be about pleasure. Better to acquire an easy sense of what works, and why, than to trot around chanting the likes of “Red wines with meat, white wines with fish.”

So, down with rules and up with sense, common or otherwise. Such as:

* Don’t some wines work better with certain foods? Sure, that happens. But that’s no reason to start building walls. The old dictates about food and wine pairings, which still are rattling around, are so narrow and confined to so few foods and wines as to make them laughable today.

Yet one guideline goes a long, liberating way. It comes down to this: If a wine is good, it will work with almost any food that’s remotely plausible for it. Yes, red wines do go with red meats. So choose whatever red wine you like and it’ll work just fine. Does lamb go with Barolo? You bet. But then, it also goes with California Cabernet Sauvignon, French Merlot, Zinfandel and a good rose.

Dry white wines, for their part, are remarkably accommodating. They can accompany almost anything except, perhaps, the strongest-flavored meats. Even there, it’s amazing how a really good dry white wine accompanies foods like sausages. In Alsace, for example, the wine of choice to accompany the famous choucroute garnie--sauerkraut garnished with various meats and sausages--is the local Riesling or Pinot Gris, both dry whites. The combination tastes great because the wines are lovely.

Sweet wines can be a bit more challenging. One good rule of thumb is that sweet trumps salty. This explains the seemingly unlikely pairing of sweet French Sauternes with salty Roquefort cheese. Smoked fish, especially hot-smoked salmon, can be surprisingly salty. A sweet white wine is just the ticket. The important thing is securing a good wine. Like an accomplished guest at a dinner table, a wine that’s good can take care of itself.

* What about letting a wine breathe? Wine has never lacked for mumbo-jumbo, but this business of “breathing” is the champion. It’s not total nonsense, but close. The facts are straightforward: All wines change when exposed to air. Almost invariably, the scent of a wine will increase after it sits in a glass for a minute or two. Hence the idea about letting a wine “breathe,” either by removing the cork hours before serving or decanting the wine into a carafe. The only problem is that after a certain amount of time, air degrades the wine.

Why, then, did this breathing business start? Because until the last 25 years or so, many wines--especially reds--were imperfectly made. They had unattractive smells that, upon prolonged exposure to air, would indeed “blow off.” Moreover, these unpleasant odors were amplified in wines aged in the bottle for decades. Aged red wines once were common and inexpensive, when time was not money.

Because of this, old wine books brim with advice about how certain wines are better for being left open in a carafe for hours before serving--or even left open a full day before drinking. (Just pulling the cork won’t do much. How much air can penetrate a full bottle with an opening less than one inch in diameter?) Indeed, the bad odors did disappear and the wines were that much more drinkable. The key, though, is that the wines were inherently flawed. Today, such flawed wines are rare.

Now, life is simpler: Just pour the wine into your (generous-size) glass, give it a vigorous swirl or two, which exposes more surface area of the wine to air, and drink up. That’s all the “breathing” any wine needs. And if the wine fails to “open up,” well, it needs more time in the bottle, not more air. Some wines simply need more cellaring than others. And no amount of “breathing” will change that.

* Should I bother to decant? Unless you’re heir to a stash of old wines, there’s no practical reason. Decanting separates the clear wine from the sediment. Old wines often have a sediment; sometimes young wines have some too, especially with today’s (welcome) trend toward unfiltered wines. But not many young wines have much sediment, even if unfiltered.

Proponents of decanting make all sorts of claims (see “breathing”) for its efficacy. It’s true that a young, “closed” wine will offer more scent if it’s exposed to air for a while. Sloshing a wine into a decanter certainly aids that.

But how much time? Ten minutes? One hour? Overnight? No one knows, which doesn’t stop advice givers from pretending otherwise. I knew a New York wine writer who insisted on fantastically precise times for letting wines breathe--without decanting them, no less. You’d be better off asking your astrologer.

There’s another element to decanting that’s worth considering: the psychological effect of removing the label from view. Some wine drinkers pay obsessive attention to the label. Decanting can help make the wine, rather than the label, the star of the show. Personally, I like to decant the wine (the better to see today’s stunning wine colors), show everyone the bottle so they know what they’re drinking and then banish the bottle to the recycling bin.

* What do I do with an unfinished bottle? The smart-aleck answer is, “Finish it.” But that’s not always possible--or advisable. So what does one do with a half-full bottle of wine if your plan is to drink it later (as opposed to cooking with it or adding it to your vinegar experiment)? All sorts of wine preservation gizmos are on the market, like pumps that ostensibly create a vacuum in a half-empty bottle (Forget it: The vacuum leaks in just a few hours) or cans of argon or nitrogen gas that you squirt into a bottle to prevent oxidation. (Yes, they do prevent oxidation, but they do little to preserve the scent of a wine.)

What works best is, happily, also the cheapest and easiest: Put the cork back in the bottle and stick the wine in the fridge. Cold reduces oxidation as effectively, if not more so, than any wine preservation device on the market. It’s as simple as that.